Kathryn L Ramage

Content: links, bio, acknowledgments, etc.

Excerpt from “Mage Vows”:

In all the civilized world, only four universities boasted having a College of Magic: Wittenberg, Edinburgh, Padua, and Maryesfont. In truth, these were sufficient for the needs of those who studied the craft, and any more would be ridiculous. There weren’t many independent students of magic. The few, great wizards took the most talented youth as their apprentices, and the rest sought lesser magicians—the aged, long past their zenith, or the young and not-yet established—to teach them. The universities accepted those who could find no more prestigious education, as well as scholars of magical lore who were not magicians themselves.

Mikha was the only magician at Maryesfont. Though still in his early twenties, he showed some remarkable powers and was considered a most promising talent, even if he was the son of a town merchant and had never found a mentor to train him.

The university at Maryesfont had begun as a convent school for the benefit of women in the dark days when such higher education was not available for females, but in these modern times, male students were also admitted provisionally if they were of good reputation and impeccable moral character. The rules of conduct within the university were exacting: Students could be expelled for sexual impropriety, for drunkenness, blasphemy, obscenity, impudence, or irregular attendance of chapel, lectures, or tutorials—all evils that the Sisters of St. Mary, Font of Wisdom, were inclined to believe young men more vulnerable to.

Mikha, however, was just the sort of student they welcomed. In addition to being a serious scholar and a true magician, he had already begun in the third purification phase of his mage’s training before he’d entered the university. This phase was a seven-year period during which a young magician lived under strict vows of abstinence: he lived chaste, drank no wine and ate no blooded meats, fasted and kept sleepless on certain days of the year, and performed rituals on certain nights. A mage might as well be a priest, and there were several of those among the university faculty.

He had been given rooms to himself above the College of Magic’s library. This arrangement gave him privacy and ready access to all the magical resources the university possessed so that he could concentrate on his studies at any hour. In return, he occasionally aided the university’s other students of magic, who knew the collection less well, in finding books, and helped the librarian keep the collection in good order.

In this cloistered and monkish life, Mikha passed the first four years of his education with relative ease. His mage vows weighed lightly upon him, for he rarely felt tempted to break them.

End of Excerpt

Use comments to leave fanmail

The Wapshott Press is now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Please donate to the Wapshott Press Thank you so much for your support. All donations are tax deductible. (We prefer to use PayPal for online donations because they give us all a break on their fees for charitable donations. And during the winter holidays, they match each donation dollar for dollar.)

3 responses to “Kathryn L Ramage”

I’m assuming that ‘Mage Vows’ has been published now, but the column to the right has become garbled so I couldn’t check this out. I was going to post reviews for the two previous titles on my WordPress review blog and suddenly wondered if the third title (featuring a dragon, I think you hinted) had appeared yet.

Has this been published yet? I was thinking of posting my reviews of the first two titles on my WordPress review blog and suddenly wondered if your next title had appeared by now.
Best wishes
Chris Lovegrove

“Mage Vows” and “Impossible Love” are lovely stories that were originally published in erotica anthologies where they really had no business being. They were the inspiration for Storylanida, The Wapshott Journal of Fiction http://storylandia.wapshottpress.com (NOT erotic fiction; we have Erotique for that), which is just about to publish Issue 9, “Rose,” by Rebecca Lartique, which is a charming story set in a mythical land. This coming July, Ms. Ramage’s mystery novella, “Death Among the Marshes,” will be published in Storylandia 10. “Sonnedragon” will probably be published around this time, so there will be a lot of Kathryn L. Ramage to read this summer.

I’ll look into the sidebar problem. Thank you for letting me know about it.

Archives

Categories

Meta

The Wapshott Press is now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Please donate to the Wapshott Press Thank you so much for your support. All donations are tax deductible. (We prefer to use PayPal for online donations because they give us all a break on their fees for charitable donations.)